Shinan: Double-O heaven

There was no hubbub, no feeding frenzy, no try-hard cackles or à la mode once-overs. There were no party-circuit Pavlovian responses to be unearthed. Nor was there any weary peering into the eyes of a shindig comrade who gives off the BFF aura of someone who you could call if your car needed a boost, but who only prompts a dash of bewilderment because you have no idea who … they … are.

Breathe in. Then out. If there was any place to ritualistically draw air down one’s abdomen, while taking in a certain 1950s colonial glamour, it would be the rugged Jamaican idyll that is GoldenEye. Long the fiefdom of Chris Blackwell, the Island Records founder — but forever associated with the man who made Bond — it’s just the place to come to sharpen one’s perceptions, or plot a double-crossing or, well, both. (Or, should the opportunity arise, to sit under a banana tree reading obituaries — my visit having coincided during the waning days of the past calendar year when the death race was on, with Kim Jong-il following Václav Havel, who himself followed Christopher Hitchens.)

The ghosts, as I learned, come complimentary at this estate, set as it is against an extemporaneous jungle. I certainly found that out when I took a quick amble through Ian Fleming’s original five-bedroom villa, from which a handful of cottages — cliff-side, beach-side, lagoon-side, take your pick — have evolved over the years at Goldeneye.

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Cecil Beaton. Graham Greene. Truman Capote. These names, and many more, are its spiritual custodians, Fleming having hosted many lit-leaning friends over the years. And then there’s the most frequent flyer of them all, playwright Noël Coward, who was Fleming’s best man at his wedding here, and whose own mythic retreat, Firefly, lies just miles away. (Of his first visit to Fleming’s nest, Coward wrote: “We arrived before dusk. It is quite perfect, a large sitting room sparsely furnished, comfortable beds and showers, an agreeable staff, a small private coral beach with lily-white sand and warm clear water. The beach is unbelievable. We swam after a delicious dinner, and lay on the sand unchilled under a full moon.”)

“And this is Fleming’s desk,” my tour guide said, guiding me into one of the four snaking houses built around a sunken swimming pool.

“But it’s against the wall!” I exclaimed, taking in the magic piece of wood where all 14 of the James Bond books are said to have been written, Fleming jotting at a reported pace of 2,000 words a day.

Precisely, the guide beamed. I looked behind me, at a gallantly rectangular window overlooking the ocean and I got it instantly. Fleming obviously knew better. Working while facing the wall was obviously a form of self-tough love, spurring an imagination from whence his long-live action pulp flowed, including those stories explicitly (or partly) set in Jamaica itself, i.e. Dr. No, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy.

“Now would you like to see the tamarind plant sowed by Princess Margaret?” My guide was on it.

Passing through more of the seamlessly inside-outside lair — a textbook case of minimalism done right — we checked out a part of the grounds where various trees have been planted by visiting celebs galore. A name-dropping grove, if there ever was one. There lay that bushy bark, courtesy of Princess Margaret, but also a royal palm laid down by the Clintons, a cinnamon tree that bears the moniker of Willie Nelson and a guava via Johnny Depp.

No velvet rope here, though. The villa, like the wider retreat itself, is still redolent of 1946, when Fleming acquired 15 acres of land on an old donkey racecourse (!) above a not-big cove on the part of the island known as Oracabessa.

Its glamour comes discreetly packaged, and none of it screams “resort” in the Forgetting Sarah Marshall sense. It’s the kind of shushed place where the ideal man’s uniform consists of beach-bum shorts, a T-shirt with a logo snatched from a swag bag given at a party one doesn’t remember anymore, and a Patek Philippe watch. The kind of place where the majority of the staff are resolutely Jamaican, and where Blackwell, the owner, actively discourages the whir of air conditioning.

Blackwell has been on the Bondwagon for a good while now. The first time the mogul laid his eyes on GoldenEye was during a lunch with Fleming. His mother, it turns out, was a good friend of the writer, and as a thank you for the stay, she gifted him with a small boat. Its name? Octopussy.

Legend further has it that Mrs. Blackwell was the inspiration herself for Honeychile Rider, the Dr. No Bond Girl who, like her, was the Jamaica-born child of an old island clan.

That speculation has now, naturally, passed into the rum punch of lore.